Tweet-a-Week

What is this “tweet-a-week” thing?

Every week – – typically on Thursday mornings – – I’ll tweet a name, phrase, sentence, or other textual nugget. Your goal is to figure out: what does this name, phrase, etc., refer to? what is the relationship between this name, phrase, etc., and Whitman or Leaves of Grass? Once you’ve gotten this far, blog your answer. Use the blog post not only to identify the name, phrase, etc., and its literal relationship to Whitman/Leaves of Grass – – use the blog post to think-aloud and ruminate on broader or deeper thematic, historical, cultural, etc. connections and relations. You should probably use a least a couple of paragraphs to do this.

To follow the tweet-a-week, you’ll need a Twitter account, and you’ll need to search via the hashtag #WhitmanSFSU. What is a hashtag? How do I “search” Twitter? The basics are here.

The tweet-a-week will require you to do some rudimentary research – – for instance, by google searching or wikipedia searching. If you really want to dig into the week’s tweet, great! However, don’t forget, the tweet-a-week is only a means to push you deeper into Whitman and his poem. Your most important labor will involve connecting the tweet and Whitman/Leaves of Grass. As we move through the semester and you work with more and more tweet-a-weeks, you’ll start to develop an intuitive sense of balance between the tweet/context and Whitman/text. This is an important research skill, e.g. not being overwhelmed by context but using context to deepen and enrich a text.

As you blog your tweet-a-weeks, the class will be building up a rich context. To capture this context, I’ll assign an editor/secretary who will work to synthesize and condense the harvest of ideas and information found in your collective tweet-a-weeks. The editor will use our class wiki pages to publish his or her synopsis. There will be serious extra-credit points attached to the editor’s job.